Okay, so it wasn’t really a tirade against anyone—the post was more of a defense of night owls. We’ve been taking a beating the last few years while the trend to praise the morning person as the model of success has gone into overdrive.

As a night owl, I got tired of hearing that I was a slacker, even though I bust my butt getting stuff done after 8 p.m. So I wrote that post.

Then, a few weeks ago, I saw this infographic—which beautifully illustrates everything I tried to articulate in that post.

Two of the hot topics in education in the last few years have been Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC’s) and the flipped classroom. I’ve been experimenting with both of them.

What I’ve learned (besides being able to use the word “pedagogy” in a sentence) is
1) assigning students lectures as homework doesn’t guarantee the students will watch them and 2) in a flipped classroom you can become hostage to the pedagogy.

Here’s the story of what we tried and what we learned.

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MOOC’s – Massive Open Online CoursesA MOOC is a complicated name for a simple idea – an online course accessible to everyone over the web. I created my MOOC by serendipity. Learning how to optimize it in my classes has been a more deliberate and iterative process.

Even critics of massive open online courses, better known as MOOCs, shouldn’t deny the value of the student data those courses generate. Teachers can only gather insights into how engaged students really are with the material and how well they’re understanding it if they’re using a platform designed specifically to capture that data. MOOCs do this very well, and now University of Michigan meteorology professor Perry Samson (who also co-founded Weather Underground) has developed software to let his peers in lecture halls do the same.

The platform is called LectureTools, and it has some obvious benefits around helping ensure students engage with a course more than is naturally possible in a room full of 250 people. While class is in session, LectureTools lets professors quiz students using a variety of different formats, lets students submit questions and note when a slide confuses them, and even lets professors…

Gym rats and exercise fiends will soon have a wealth of connected equipment and tools that can track their movement, biological data and make exercise recommendations all based on algorithms running in the cloud. Instead of a personal trainer you might wear a wristband that tracks your workout against your goals and then suggests a few more reps.

Atlas Wearables, an Austin, Texas, company, has built a wristband that can track a variety of exercises and the wearer’s heart rate to offer up suggestions for exercises to work different muscles or just to help you meet goals. I covered the company at its launch during the TechStars demo day, because I was impressed that it had created algorithms that can track what movement a person is making. At the time, the company’s CEO and co-founder Peter Li wasn’t sure if he wanted to license the motion algorithm technology to…

We’re no strangers to interacting with businesses through the internet and mobile apps in the U.S., but in developing regions that’s not a luxury most people have. In countries like Tanzania, Rawanda and Somalia, most people’s sole means of communication is a basic feature phone, so if you’re business wanting to communicate with your customers digitally, you pretty much have one choice: SMS.

But for San Francisco startup Telerivet, SMS is plenty to work with. It’s designed a low-cost cloud-based SMS management system and Android(s goog) app that lets businesses and non-governmental organizations turn an ordinary smartphone into a messaging gateway. Through that gateway a company’s customers, clients and employees can access data through simple SMS messages.

I had to chance to chat with Telerivet CEO and co-founder Joshua Stern, who definitely has a unique story behind his company. Like many Silicon Valley startups, it began with a computer…